My research team at Forrester helps tech vendor strategists anticipate and navigate in rapidly changing market environments. We can't take a siloed view on specific product and service categories, but rather broaden our perspective in order to trace cross-market dynamics around key issues such as sustainability, globalization, collaboration, mobility, and cloud. This puts tech vendors in better positions to act on emerging demand signals, competitive scenarios, and opportunities to select best-fit partner, channel, or acquisition targets.

The market for dedicated solutions and services that help companies manage their energy, emissions, and overall sustainability strategy is still nascent. The evolution of sustainability at larger software and IT service vendors started with their internal efforts, which is an important factor framing their portfolio and go-to-market strategies.

As a result, there are still a significant number of vendors that are converting their internal capabilities to analyze, define, and implement sustainability into customer-facing software and/or service portfolios. These portfolios of services go well beyond green IT, increasingly focused to serve clients wrestling with hot topics such as enterprise carbon and energy management (ECEM), green supply chain, and sustainability performance management.

My colleague, Daniel Krauss, and I have recently completed a comprehensive round of interviews and analysis with many different players offering sustainability consulting services, including software, IT and business services, hardware, and even industrial companies (see Figure 1).